Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons, born December 13, 1902, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and died May 8, 1979, was an American sociologist working in the classical tradition. He is most famous for developing social action theory and structural functionalism, and is regarded as one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century. After completing a PhD in economics, he taught at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he became one of the first professors in Harvard's new sociology department, and later played a key role in creating the university's Department of Social Relations.

Social evolutionism

Parsons' social action theory was the first broad, systematic, and generalizable theory of social systems based on empirical data, developed in both the United States and Europe. Among his major contributions to English-language sociology were his translations of Max Weber's work and his analyses of Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto.

These thinkers heavily shaped his views and formed the basis for his social action theory. He saw voluntaristic action as constrained by cultural values and social structures, which ultimately determine all social actions, rather than by internal psychological processes. Though generally labeled a structural functionalist, in a 1975 article he said that "functional" and "structural functionalist" were inappropriate descriptions of his theory.

Legacy

Starting in the 1970s, a newer generation of sociologists criticized his theories as socially conservative and his writing as needlessly complex. Sociology courses now give his work less emphasis than during his peak popularity from the 1940s to the 1970s, though interest in his ideas has recently revived. Parsons strongly advocated for professionalizing sociology and expanding it within American academia. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1949 and served as its secretary from 1960 to 1965.

Early life

Parsons was born to Edward Smith Parsons and Mary Augusta Ingersoll. His father, a Congregationalist minister who attended Yale Divinity School, had served a pioneer community in Greeley, Colorado, and at the time of Talcott's birth was a professor of English and vice-president at Colorado College. During his ministry in Greeley, Edward sympathized with the Social Gospel movement but viewed it from a higher theological standpoint and opposed socialist ideology.

Amherst College

As an undergraduate at Amherst College, Parsons studied biology and philosophy, earning his BA in 1924. Amherst was a family tradition: his father, uncle Frank, and older brother Charles Edward had all attended. Initially drawn to medicine by his brother's example, he took extensive biology courses and spent a summer at the Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

His biology professors were Otto C. Glaser and Henry Plough. Gently called "Little Talcott, the gilded cherub," he became a student leader. He also took courses with institutional economists Walton Hale Hamilton and Clarence Edwin Ayres, who introduced him to authors like Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and William Graham Sumner.

Hamilton, in particular, steered him toward social science. Parsons also studied Kant's philosophy with George Brown and modern German philosophy with Otto Manthey-Zorn, a noted Kant interpreter. He showed a strong early interest in philosophy.

Two term papers he wrote for Clarence E. Ayres at Amherst, known as the Amherst Papers, have survived and are of great interest to scholars. The first, from December 19, 1922, was titled "The Theory of Human Behavior in its Individual and Social Aspects." The second, from March 27, 1923, was "A Behavioristic Conception of the Nature of Morals." These papers reveal his early interest in social evolution and show that he disagreed with his professors, arguing that technological development and moral progress are two structurally independent empirical processes.

After Amherst, Parsons spent a year at the London School of Economics, where he encountered the work of Bronisław Malinowski, R. H. Tawney, L. T. Hobhouse, and Harold Laski. At LSE he befriended E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth, all participants in Malinowski's seminar, and formed a close friendship with Arthur and Eveline M. Burns. There he met Helen Bancroft Walker, a young American, and they married on April 30, 1927. The couple had three children: Anne, Charles, and Susan.

In June, Parsons moved to Heidelberg University, where he earned his PhD in sociology and economics in 1927. At Heidelberg he worked with Alfred Weber (Max Weber's brother), Edgar Salin (his dissertation adviser), Emil Lederer, and Karl Mannheim. He was examined on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by philosopher Karl Jaspers and on the French Revolution by Willy Andreas. His doctoral thesis, "The Concept of Capitalism in the Recent German Literature," focused on Werner Sombart and Max Weber, and he clearly rejected Sombart's quasi-idealistic views.